I want to talk about meditation. I want to talk about it because it is a foundational tool; it’s one of those practices that pays off because of your commitment. It’s not easy-peasy, it's not a quick fix, but it is a daily comfort. It’s a self-care tool that sits alongside your other essential actions, like brushing your teeth or salt scrubbing your body.
Meditation: It’s not easy, but maybe it’s not hard either. Maybe it’s just important. And I think you can do it. I want to talk about meditation because I think you can do it!
There’s a mystique around meditation. Some people are in awe of the practice, doubting that they could ever do it themselves. They often frame the practice in a big and intimidating scope. They imagine Buddhist nuns in their hours of frozen holiness. They are overwhelmed at the perceived pain and otherworldly devotion of Vipassana, the 10-day courses of silent meditation held by donation around the world.
I find that people who could use the exercise the most are confused by meditation, simultaneously fearful of it and attracted to it, these conflicting feelings bundled into a container of self doubt.
But meditation, if you are drawn to it, I'm sure you can do it! It’s not as serious as most folks might think. It’s a block of time scheduled into your routine, it’s something to never skip and always cherish, no matter the outcome—in that way, it is serious. You have to be serious about always doing it. “Do I have time to meditate today?” Well, that’s a troublesome question, and perhaps just another burden on the yoke of responsibilities that we all carry. The best kind of meditation practice is not debateable, it’s strict and its strictness eventually becomes a comfort. Meditation is so nourishing that you won’t want it taken from you.
In my story, it took months for my meditation practice to become purely nourishing. At first, fitting two 20-minute blocks of meditation into my morning and evening was a source of struggle. Would I forget? What about work, I often worked evenings as a caterer, I could never meditate at work! What if I couldn’t find time? What if I was out and about and I didn’t want to interrupt the flow and meditate? What if I didn’t have a comfortable place to meditate? Wouldn’t meditation prevent me from being spontaneous?
The first year of Vedic meditation practice, I worked out these conflicts. I had to innovate, I had to play with my ideas of what meditation is, I had convince myself that it was ok if the setting for my sitting wasn’t perfect, I had to commit to a schedule and realize that perhaps my fixation around spontaneity wasn’t beneficial to me. These swirling questions, these personal advancements and sometime setbacks were all woven together with the stabilizing reminder, “You can do it, don’t skip, keep doing it.”
I have to be honest: If I didn’t pay for meditation instruction, I am not really sure that I would have stuck with it at first. That’s where I was at that time in my life. I wasn’t in a place of consistency. I was just beginning my foray into self-improvement in the aftermath of the suicide of someone close to me in my family. I knew that mental health issues existed powerfully in my genes; there’s little cancer, little heart disease, hardly any diabetes in my gene pool, but quite a few examples of mental health difficulties. I often felt too sensitive, I often felt compassless, I wanted a stabilizing practice. I too was intrigued by meditation, and also doubtful about my own ability to do it.
I think I felt like many people do when they hem and haw about gaining a skill or receiving insight from a teacher or practitioner: These professionals are often costly, people who need their services are often struggling financially, and nobody wants to feel ripped off or like they are on a woo-woo shopping spree.
That’s where the personal commitment comes in; if you are going to embark on a relationship with a healer, a health practitioner, or a teacher, you have to have the time and devotion to follow through personally. This means meditating, self-caring, journaling, taking the herbs, etc.—pursue the prescriptions! These professionals provide the tools and the support; clients must follow through on the practices or else they might find themselves exclaiming, “What a rip-off!” And the bummer is, not following is the client ripping off themselves and their own potential.
But hey, you aren’t going to rip yourself off because you can do it. If you want to. And if you don’t want to, don’t. It’s a good idea to at least know that much about yourself. Don’t do it if you don’t want to!
I wanted to do it. I was looking for solutions. I wanted to be better to myself and better to those around me. I was known to be moody. When I felt the stress and strain of life, I couldn’t self-soothe. Meditation, yeah, it stressed me out at first, I wasn’t sure if I would ever have the chops. But it’s weird, now it’s like I know a song. It’s a funny and goofy song and it sprung from nowhere, but I know that the practice made the intensely personal, embarrassingly silly, song possible. This is the song I sing when life’s pratfalls and mysteries confound and frighten me.
Meditation is my cheery song of self-soothing.
Meditation is the fertilizer for the ground where we grow dreams.
My dream at that time? Be happier, less nervous, less scared, more robust and trusting. To be less cranky, to be more silly.
My meditation teacher is fun and silly, a talented artist and more, and that was very attractive to me. Over four years ago, I called him just as summer solstice rolled around. I decided to take a portion of the very small amount of money I inherited after the suicide of my loved one and learn meditation. My teacher was at the grocery store when I called him and it was one of those important life meetings; I can remember the pattern of the carpet I stared at as we talked, the cool breeze coming from the open window of my house on East 15th Street, the nopal cactus in my backyard standing stiffly.
My teacher learned the meditation technique from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1970, the sweet giggling elfin man that wooed the Beatles to India. This is, yes, the Maharishi of the Maharishi University, and yes, this practice is also called Transcendental Meditation. My teacher calls it Vedic meditation and so do I; my teacher is not affiliated with Maharishi University, and his instruction is blessedly much less costly than their programs in T.M. I have to say that I am not interested in the Maharishi University or its T.M. instruction, but affiliation with those organizations is not necessary to this technique.
I paid my teacher the equivalent of my share of a month’s rent to learn Vedic meditation—a small amount as I reflect on the impact. Determined not to make a mistake with these precious funds, I knew that complete commitment was the only option.
My teacher lives in the Sunset District on San Francisco. Our first meeting, I brought him traditional gifts of flowers and fruit, as I was instructed. He assigned me a mantra, a word that I repeat over and over in my mind during my meditations. We said my mantra aloud, and then we began meditate, cycling through the mantra, deferring to the mantra when thoughts came up. I silently course over my mantra over and over mentally in my practice, but I will never say my mantra aloud again.
After several beneficial meetings, I was equipped to practice every day, 20 minutes before breakfast, 20 minutes before dinner. It’s been over four years and approximately 64,000 minutes of meditation—wow! I feel proud of myself for investing my time in something that helps me to feel better. I feel great about my commitment, the slow carving of this technique into a safe place for my mind and body to release.
It hasn’t always been perfect. Sometimes, though rarely, it’s not even the optimal 20 minutes, but it’s always there. I have meditated in a parked car, on the sidewalk, in a car careening through the mountains, on a park bench. I have done my evening meditation at 1 p.m., instead of before dinner, in order to work a hefty all-night catering shift. I meditate in the midst of noise, I once found my eyes popping open during meditation and spacing out. I reminded myself, “Keep your eyes closed, even if that’s hard for you.”
I once meditated next to my husband at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC in the Chinese Garden Court on hard, cold stone benches. A stranger whispered seductively in my ear, “Are you mediating?” I did not open my eyes or answer. The stranger’s words snake into my meditation frequently. The remembrance makes me smile.
I sometimes had to ask a stranger for a place to meditate when I was a touring musician. It was hard to single out myself as that weirdo, but I was always gracefully accommodated. Other times on tour, I put a blanket over my head in order to take the space to practice in the van.
Almost always, at the end of my meditation, when I count to 100 after the 20 minutes is up, per the technique, I yawn and tears stream down my face. Cool, sweet, relieving tears, cleansing the highly stressed and overused eyes, resetting the nervous system. Ayurveda says that tears are the bi-product of building a healthy nervous system. My meditation teacher also reports of these cool, purifying tears. It’s beautiful to leave the practice with eyelashes moist from the relief and release of the meditation.
Along with the tears, there are muscle twitches and miniscule shakes that can happen during meditation; it’s just the release. Oh and thoughts. There are thoughts. Many thoughts. Unending thoughts. Thoughts that come and come and come and come. And these thoughts are normal, you are doing it right. It’s no big deal.
“But I can’t stop having thoughts!” People who doubt their ability to meditate are haunted by the thoughts, or the idea of being alone with their thoughts. No doubt, there will be thoughts! But even Pema Chodron, the Tibetan Buddhist nun who spent a year in silence at one point, admits to having thoughts during meditation. Many thoughts.
If you have thoughts, you are still doing it right. Return to the mantra, that’s my reassurance when I am swamped with tedious thinking. I have bolted up during my practice and started a to-do list at a particularly stressful time; it was an involuntary movement on the part of my frazzled body, but hey, great evidence that I was overcome by thoughts and swamped by life. I have accidentally shouted to my husband, “Don’t forget to take out the trash!” or some equally trivial statement during my meditation. These bloopers serve to bring me more perspective on my reality. If I am that stressed out, maybe life adjustment is needed to compliment the meditation practice.
Without meditation, would I have that distance to take a better look at myself and my behavior? A great meditation session brings me concern and tenderness for myself, not judgement.
That lack of judgement is what gives me permission to modify my practice if I need to. My teacher taught me to always sit when meditating; it’s not necessary to take the traditional cross-legged seat that is confounding to Westerners, you can take a seat in a comfy chair. Me, I practice one of my two daily meditations laying on the ground in shavasana. I practice 40 minutes of yoga every morning and have modified my morning meditation into the corpse pose, laying flat on the floor, or with a bolster under my knees.
If body mechanics are limiting your confidence about having a regular practice, please modify. I would never fall asleep during a meditation, that’s just not me. My mind is too active. But for those who tend to snooze during the practice, a more engaged sitting posture is beneficial.
But the issue of posture during meditation brings me back to my point: You can do it. I don’t think there’s a wrong way to do it. Do it in the ways that keep you coming back, that keep the exercise firmly in place in your life. Work your way up to 20 minutes, work your way up to twice a day, work your way up to sitting, just keep working it.
If you are afraid of doing it wrong, fear not. The only wrong way is the absent day, the day you didn’t do it at all.
You can meditate and still be spontaneous, you can meditate and still be a regular guy. There's no need for dogma in this practice, call it "resting" if it makes it less loaded.
I don't meditate to be holier-than-thou, I don't meditate searching for a greater truth. I meditate because I need a tool. I meditate because I need structure. I meditate because I like ceremony. I meditate because I toil upon life's mysteries, and this practice is a comforting, unarticulated answer. It's not an explanation, it's not a truth, it's a comprehension that touches the body without traveling through cognition. I meditate also because 64,000 minutes spent in tranquility is a an expression of my alliance with peaceful beings.
Meditation: It's the harmonizing of the self song. And there's no wrong note. If you want to do it, try it. Take a class if you are really called. I believe in you. You can do it.
Helpful links:
My meditation teacher:
http://quietpathmeditation.com/
Weekly meditation group lead by my colleague Mollie Moorehead:
http://www.meetup.com/SF-Meditation-for-Busy-People-with-Active-Minds/
An interview with Pema Chodron:
Eva Saelens is a professional member of the National Ayurvedic Medical Association, with over 1500 hours of training in Ayurveda, massage therapy, and Ayurvedic treatments. She graduated from the California College of Ayurveda in 2013. Subsequently, Eva spent a year interning and studying Ayurveda, Tibetan medicine, whole foods nutrition, aromatherapy, and pancha karma at the dhyana Center in Sebastopol, Calif., and in India.